Midday in the Puget Sound. The sun has spread out a grey blanket to sit upon a spell – her momentary respite perhaps before her virtual global light show with sunset and sunrise at Stonehenge.

We celebrate this annual rite, welcoming the arrival of summer and the longest day here in the Northern Hemisphere after a fierce season of unbearably lengthy days. We have a new sensibility and awareness about what constitutes a long day now. How a long day has the power to mesh time, liminality, and our own inner longings and discontents.

This fertile Earth and us, her reticent inhabitants, are tilted on the axis of things in 2020 in ways both unforeseen and inevitable. Picture that long-ago moment at the summer fair, hanging upside down in the sky near the top of the Skydiver ride, with the vintage metal carriage spinning in the sky and squeaking its protests – something about the weight of it all bearing down upon its rusty gears. We are those dazed and tethered occupants, trapped for a time in this grand loop and temporal turn between boarding and disembarking.

We cannot see across the horizon where earth meets sky meets light meets warmth and grace. Yet from this view, our noticing takes in a celestial confluence of happenings – a solar eclipse, eight planets in retrograde, and a fresh new June moon – together with a panorama of both pandemic and pandemonium.

Many days during this first half of 2020, it has felt ike being a trapped junebug in a hot mason jar and while there’s no escaping it all (short of finding our own ways to go off the grid for a while), we can allow these transitional moments and calendar page turnings, such as what the Solstice proffers us, to be seasonal portals to float above and beyond the fray of it all.

At this mid-year point, I’m looking for my own escape from the carnival and carnage below me. I look back upon my Solstice musings from 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 for guidance on how to embody a sense of summer anticipation and lightheartedness, but none offer me a user’s manual for how to continue to weather this extended season of liminality.

What I must do is turn inward, to trust that I know that I know, which of course, I don’t. I can’t make sense of anything or anyone out there in the mad, sad world. And this epiphany is what lends me my first navigational hint in the form of two new mantras that popped into my head yesterday:

 

Less people, more steeple.
For all the physical distancing, quarantining, and at-home realities that these last six months delivered, I was pretty hooked into my social spheres and my work in the world, offering rituals, emotional labor, and other acts of service to help heal the wounds of those around me. And this is all to say that I wouldn’t change a thing about how I showed up and to whom in this revolutionary season. But without realizing it, I ended up doing a whole lot of peopling.

Less people, more steeple is the perfect mantra to carry me into this second half of the year, focusing more on spiritual practices that replenish my soul rather than deplete my energy. This summer, I’m saying yes to more walking, more reading, more writing, more artmaking, and more solitary sojourning. Less people is about less talk and more steeple is about rediscovering the little altars everywhere that reveal the sacred in the ordinary.

 

Less screen time, more green time.
There have been all kinds of reasons to get hooked into social media and electronic devices these past months, being as it was, the “spring of hope and winter of despair.”

And…I can readily admit that I’m eager for a digital detox. Less screen time, more green time is my reminder to get out and go within, and to remember that nature provides. She has been selling sanctuary since time immemorial. And that the forest, meadow, ocean, trail, garden, park, and lakeshore are where it’s at. Granted, I won’t be getting too far – it’s the summer of the Staycation if ever there was one – but I can draw a circle around this city, county, and state I call home and locate plenty of green acres where the idea of getting lost as a way to find myself sounds wholly appealing.

So here’s to less of this and more of that. And here’s to hands in soil as a remedy to turmoil. Here’s to encountering dandelions and ladybugs and every tiny thing in nature, and being brought to ground by the beauty of it all. Here’s to turning the corner into this next unknown like a shy preschooler. And here’s to finding new odes and modes for joy.

 

Unlikely Love Song
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Praise the summer, its
endless drought. How we’d rather
revile it, change it, pray

for the world to be another way.
Praise the sky, relentlessly clear,
and the dry field that crunches

beneath our feet.
We dream of green, dream
of laughing in the rain, dream

of puddles and the thin river
rising. But praise the scarcity,
how it teaches us what

we would rather not know—
how fragile the balance,
how everything matters,

how through struggle, we grow.

(from hush, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio, 2020.)